We continue our Meet the Team series with a chat with our Operations Director, Paul Lees.
- How long have you worked at Crest IT? 6 years
- What does a typical day look like? Wow, incredibly varied! It ranges from liaising with the Helpdesk team to identifying any possible customer issues which may require any particularly urgent or out-of-the-norm action to help the customer. Or I could be helping the admin team out with day-to-day tasks, right the way through to meetings with suppliers (current and new) to review the products and services we offer, and how better we might be able to help customers with their various projects.
- Over the last 12 months, have you seen any trends / or challenges that businesses are facing around their IT systems? Security has most definitely been a popular theme, the rate at which customers are targeted has increased significantly over the last 12/24 months, this is why we have invested heavily in our own security processes so that we can better support customers with their information security needs. We are now Cyber Essential Plus and ISO27001 certified making us well placed to help customers.
- Can you give us one example of how Crest IT has helped a customer in the last 12 months? A customer needed a very short notice relocation of their IT hardware, our Helpdesk team was fully booked, but the customer was desperate to move quickly to avoid possible extra costs to them, so David and I moved our work around and hopped on to the tools ourselves to help the customer out, we may be Directors of the business, but we’re not shy at mucking in to help out when needed!
- Do you have an unusual or funny support desk story you can tell us? An embarrassing one of my own actually, working at home one day, I took a break and my then 5-year-old son wanted to paint a picture using ‘Paint.’ I left him happily painting away only to later find all emails from my inbox had been deleted! Not knowing the exact dates of each email meant I couldn’t remember where to recover them from in my deleted items, fortunately, our Helpdesk found a clever way of restoring them all, to my immense relief!
- What are your predictions for the 12 months within IT? Security will continue to play a huge part, along with users relying more heavily on cloud applications in a continued move away from the upfront cost and ongoing upkeep of physical equipment.
- Do you have a favourite video game? Yes W2K22 (but only because I play this with my 9-year-old son, it’s the time with him I enjoy rather than the game itself).
- What’s your favourite pizza topping? It would have to be some sort of meat with caramelized onion and goat’s cheese, I’m told that’s too posh for a pizza but I like it!
Meet the rest of our team here, and if you would like to discuss your IT needs, contact Paul Lees.